The World Wide Web (“the Web”) is a system for publishing information, in which users may use a web browser application to retrieve information, such as web pages, from web servers and display it. Search engines, subject indices, and links between web pages and web sites facilitate the exploration of information published on the Web.
The Web has increasingly become a medium used to shop for products. Indeed, thousands and thousands of different products may be purchased on the Web. A user who plans to purchase a product on the Web can visit the Web site of a Web merchant that sells the product view information about the product, give an instruction to purchase the product, and provide information needed to complete the purchase, such as payment and shipping information.
Some web merchants enable a user to identify a list of items that they are interested in receiving as gifts, called a “wish list.” Other users that desire to give a gift to that user can view the user's wish list, and then purchase an item from the wish list for the user. When using such wish lists, the gift recipient is more likely to receive appropriate gifts that they desire, and a gift giver is more likely to be able to provide such gifts to the recipient. By providing such a wish list functionality, a web merchant can also often sale items otherwise would not have, thereby generating additional sales and profits for the web merchant.
While conventional wish lists can produce significant benefits, they also have a substantial shortcoming: it often requires considerable effort for gift givers to review wish lists, particularly long ones, and select appropriate gifts to give to gift recipients.
In view of this disadvantage of conventional gift registries, a more powerful wish list functionality that assisted gift givers in selecting gifts for gift recipients would have significant utility.